Applications are made up of a large number of instructions and data. Instructions operate on data which is fetched in a cache and memory and is always unencrypted. Scaled-out, distributed applications are made up of a large number of application instances. These application instances have their own data in the cache and memory of the processor on which these applications run. A large number of such application instances communicate with each other and process data in parallel to create an aggregate output.
With thousands or even millions of applications and application instances running on a large number of servers, it is difficult to determine the health of an individual application or application instance and the security details of the individual application or application instance. Especially in virtualized data centers, applications are moved with the virtual machine (VM) or with a container. Tracking applications in such large data centers with virtualized workloads becomes yet another challenge. Moreover, security and behavior of the application become difficult tasks to maintain.
Scaled-out, distributed applications work as large numbers of application instances which may Dc be spread across a data center. Each instance of the application processes different data sets in parallel. Due to virtualization and allocation of resources dynamically across the data center, tracing each instance of the application is incredibly useful for management of the data center, if not necessary.
Also, these types of scaled-out applications are extremely vulnerable to application breaches, data thefts from cache and memory by scraping, and other methods of illicitly obtaining data from the applications, cache, and/or memory. In data centers which cater to important applications and data types, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Payment Card Industry (PCI) data, medical information that falls under Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), military and Government critical tasks, any application and/or data breach is very destructive and expensive to contain and/or resolve. Therefore, it is beneficial to attempt to prevent such breaches.